In May 2000, British police raided the Manchester home of reputed al-Qaeda operative Nazih Abdul Hamed al-Raghie, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Anas al-Libi. Last Tuesday, some 10 days after having been plucked from the streets of Tripoli by US special forces, al-Libi was arraigned in a New York courthouse on charges relating to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Among the possessions seized from al-Libi’s home in the May 2000 raid, investigators discovered a 180-page handwritten document that has been widely cited in the intervening years as a supposed al-Qaeda training manual: the famous “Manchester Manual.”

While it may help prosecutors to convict al-Libi, however, on closer inspection the manual shows that the jihadist “cause” to which al-Libi rallied nearly a quarter of a century ago is essentially the same cause that the United States and its Western allies have been supporting in places such as Libya and Syria today…